One of the many little-known facts about the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics is that some 25% of its territory lies north of the Arctic Circle. The Soviet Arctic (some of which is south of the Circle) is the Soviet Union's pioneerland, a vast (2,316,600 sq. mi.), cold, potentially rich region, bigger than the West that lay before the pioneering U. S. 100 years ago. Since 1932 the U. S. S. R. has systematically explored its northland, not only for its resources (nickel, copper, lumber, coal, reindeer, fish, fur), but in an ambitious effort eventually to open for year-round navigation the narrow passage of ice-choked water, now navigable only in summer, which fringes the tundras just south of the Arctic Pack. If that Northeast Passage were open. Russia would have an all-Russian sea route from its European frontier to the Pacific, 3,000 miles shorter than the 9,000-mile Odessa-Vladivostok route, and would fulfill a dream of Peter the Great's to make a place for Russia on the seas. Last week Moscow hailed 15 heroes who had got into a lot of trouble helping to bring fulfillment of that dream nearer.
In the summer of 1937, the Soviet icebreaker Sedov was doing exploration work in the Kara Sea and making a hydrological survey of the Laptev Sea, two links of the Northeast Passage (see map). In October, most of her work done, she was sent to the rescue of two other icebreakers, the Sadko and Malygin, icebound in the floes of the Laptev. Winter set in early that year, and on Oct. 23 the Sedov was fast in the ice too. Professor Rudolph Lazarevich Samoilovich. leader of the expedition, ordered the 217 men and women aboard the three ships to settle down to a winter of scientific observation.
By March 2, 1938, the Sedov had drifted 3° north. 21° east. On that day the drift of the ice floes shifted and the three ships began to move northwestward toward the North Pole. Meanwhile Joseph Stalin had sent an air expedition to rescue the crews. The fliers reached the ships on April 2, promptly arrested Professor Samoilovich for bungling, thereby giving him the distinction of being arrested closer to the North Pole than any other man in history.
On Aug. 28 the icebreaker Yermak reached the ships, towed the Sadko and Malygin to clear water. The Sedov, her screw damaged, was left in the ice. Aboard her were 14 men picked for stamina from the four ships, under Constantine Badigin. who had been elected captain of the Sedov. The new icebreaker J. Stalin tried to reach the Sedov, but another winter set in and she had to give up. At this point Joseph Stalin decided to turn the Arctic fiasco into an asset. He purged the Glavnoye Upravlenya, Severnovo Morskovo Puty (Central Administration of the Northern Sea Route—Glavsevmorput' for short), kicked its chief. Professor Otto Schmidt, upstairs into a vice-presidency of the Academy of Sciences, named 46-year-old Ivan Papanin (who had made himself famous by drifting from the North Pole almost to central Greenland on an ice pan) to be head of Glavsevmorput'. Then the Soviet press started whooping up the drift of the Sedov as a national adventure story. Its goals: to drift closer to the North Pole than Nansen's celebrated Fram (1893-96); if possible, to reach the Pole (where Ivan Papanin planted the Red Flag in 1937).